by Allison Hertog
There’s no doubt that the rise of education savings accounts represents a revolution in the definition of public education that generates lots of excitement in the wonky world of education reform. ESAs can be seen as the ultimate libertarian triumph of the parental choice movement. Whether they succeed or fail will depend, above all else, on whether parents are satisfied.
It’s too soon to know whether ESAs in Florida and elsewhere are truly catching on with parents. But will parents choose to customize their children’s education, essentially creating schools of one, or will they decide it’s a task better left to professional providers or, God forbid, bureaucrats?
Many ESA parents will want their kids to have an educational program that mirrors the structure of what they would have in public school, only better. That is, they’ll want their kids to have physical education, art, music, maybe even dance and horseback riding, not to mention all the academic classes. As a former educator and parent, even thinking about that prospect is exhausting.
Now, imagine adding to that the therapies and specialized instruction that comes with having a special needs child. Then imagine being a low-income single parent and assembling an education for your child while trying to hold down a job.
This is the challenge presented by education savings accounts, and finding ways to help parents overcome it should be an essential ingredient for any conversation about getting the policy right. Bringing together the right mix of providers, and judging the quality of each, while remaining within a budget, can be daunting, especially for parents who are economically disadvantaged. Ten thousand dollars, the approximate annual amount per child of Florida’s Personal Learning Scholarship Accounts for special needs students may sound like an enormous sum of money until you have to put together a comprehensive program for a full academic year.
As an advocate for special needs children, I’ve already been approached by parents who are taking advantage of Florida’s PLSA and need help navigating these choices. I can only imagine how many other parents would benefit from similar assistance.
Some homeschool parents have overcome this challenge by joining home education cooperatives or forming informal networks of parents who help each other make informed choices. Those who have the means might hire private educational consultants.
But what about parents who don’t have access to these forms of support, or who may not know where to begin?
If parents have to spend an ordinate amount of time getting “schooled” in education, dip into their own pockets – or spend scholarship funds that could otherwise provide for their child’s education – to get help navigating the system, they may just throw-up their hands and abandon ESA programs altogether.
Who should be charged with offering this assistance? They should be impartial, meaning they shouldn’t have ties to specific providers who might be marketing their services to parents. They should be qualified to help parents separate educators from charlatans.
But should they be independent consultants? People housed at universities? Part of a new breed of bureaucrats in a government agency? Should this be a service provided by state education departments, or, in states where the accounts are privately administered, scholarship funding organizations?
Florida, having the oldest and most developed school choice environment of any state, has eight school choice parent information centers around the state which aim to give lower-income parents a taste of what school options they have – virtual, charter, private, voucher, magnets.
Those are a good start, but if ESAs are going to catch on broadly, advice must be more detailed and individualized.
All of those approaches have trade-offs, and each may be worth trying in the various states that have programs in place. What matters is that parents have access to “navigators” of some kind, to help ensure these cutting-edge programs, and the children they’re intended to serve, succeed
